Why Trump's Racism Isn't Normal
He remains the worst of us.
Donald Trump posted a video on his social media last week that was both characteristically unhinged and racist. After spreading baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election, the video depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This was about as close as Trump will get to acknowledging Black History Month.
The video, which I don’t need to share here, was so offensive that Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries even said “Fuck Donald Trump” in an Instagram video denouncing it. Trump has long deserved this fire, especially after his openly racist remarks about Somalis, including Jeffries’ colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar. (Watch below.)
The White House eventually removed the racist video, but Trump refuses to apologize to the Obamas. “I didn’t make a mistake,” he insisted — a sentiment I doubt his mother shared after he was born.
A Lilliputian’s handful of Republicans criticized the video, while most remained silent or openly defended Trump. By the time you read this, Trump will have done something worse. It’s a familiar pattern.
Donald Trump is the most openly racist president since Jefferson Davis, who wasn’t actually president of the United States but the Confederacy. The United States has had its problems, but I think we can distinguish between a nation founded on at least the ideal that all “men are created equal” and a white supremacist slave state that openly rejected that principle. Unfortunately, many liberals argue that Trump’s racism is simply unfiltered right-wing politics.
Journalist Jemele Hill posted on social media Friday:
You’ll likely see some conservatives come out and condemn Trump comparing the Obamas to apes, but realize white supremacy has always relied on a certain amount of performative civility. Calling the former president and First Lady apes is taking things too far, but removing/suppressing Black history, using fake outrage against DEI to push an anti-Black agenda, and not addressing structural inequality is considered “policy.”
I don’t think it’s a good idea to normalize Trump’s racism with a variation of Avenue Q’s “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” I also don’t think basic civility is performative. It’s what makes life tolerable. President Mike Pence and certainly President Nikki Haley would not call women reporters “piggy” or order them to smile. I think that matters even if they would’ve still advanced anti-abortion policies.
I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 1980s. I’m sure most of my teachers were Republicans and quite a few probably held racist views. However, they still believed it was inappropriate to express those views publicly. I don’t care if that was “performative.” My childhood would’ve been miserable if my teachers openly made racist remarks every day or tolerated it from other students. A kid who passed around a picture of me depicted as an ape would’ve gotten detention. If Trump has made open displays of bigotry more socially acceptable, that only makes society crueler not more “honest.”
Trump’s continued attacks against the Obamas — his intellectual and moral superiors in every way — has renewed discussion about what writer Noah Berlatsky has described as a “massive fascist backlash” to Barack Obama’s presidency. It wasn’t “exactly about a Black president so much as it’s about the rise of a coalition that could elect a Black president.”
I think the fascist backlash was a predictable right-wing freak out to even a (temporary) loss of power. After all, Democrats had practically been controlled opposition during the Reagan/Bush years, and the 2008 election was the most significant and decisive ass whooping a Democrat had delivered since 1964. Obama won more of the popular vote than Bill Clinton, and Republicans didn’t handle defeat any better when the boy from Hope beat George H.W. Bush. I was seeing “Impeach Clinton” bumper stickers in South Carolina by December 1992.
Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell turned a blind eye and even actively exploited genuine racist backlash to Obama, but I don’t think their motivations were explicitly racist. They would’ve been similarly opposed to Presidents Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.
I recall a friend at the time insisting that her Republican relatives loathed Obama because he was a Democrat and it wasn’t racially motivated. Yet, she had to admit that they’d never hated another Democrat this much, not even Bill or Hillary Clinton.
When conservatives said they didn’t like that “draft dodging womanizer,” their contempt for Clinton was at least based in reality. My mother was a lifelong Democrat and Clinton supporter, but she was also a deeply moral woman who obviously didn’t appreciate Clinton’s philandering nor his obvious lies about his infidelity. She rolled her eyes when Clinton attempted the Shaggy defense when Gennifer Flowers released recordings of phone conversations between them. “That’s obviously Bill Clinton’s voice on those tapes,” she said. “Who else could it be? Not even Rich Little’s that good.”
When Clinton finally confessed to an “inappropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky, my mother called me to express her disappointment: “That Zell Tephet did it again!” (OK, this requires some explanation: “Zell Tephet” was apparently a member of my mother’s church who she remembered from her childhood as a notorious liar. I never fully believed anyone with that name ever actually existed.)
Supporting Bill Clinton was often like supporting the Mets. You often felt let down. Barack Obama was in a different category altogether. He was consistently scandal free — “no drama,” you might say. Most Obama hate was rooted in conspiracies and narratives that were fundamentally untrue, which is a cornerstone of racial prejudice. Right-wing media, especially Fox News, fueled this fire. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were significant enough that Democrats might’ve ignored the simmering racial resentment. New York Times reporter Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that in 2008 “racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.”
This is what distinguishes Trump from other, more opportunistic Republicans. He personifies that ugly racial resentment, once kept in the shadows. “Polite” Republicans called Obama a “socialist,” which at least is an ideological difference. Trump promoted the baseless “Birther” theory, suggesting that Obama was inherently unfit to serve as president because he was not “truly” American. White liberals have been called “socialist.” Many openly embrace the label. Obama was the first president whose fundamental citizenship was questioned.
It infuriated Trump that a Black man was president and this unreasoning racial hatred fueled his eventual presidential campaign. As Berlatsky observed, “The appeal of Trump to his base, and really the core promise of his presidency, is to make open white supremacy in its most vicious public form acceptable again, I think. They love the ethnic cleansing, but the ethnic cleansing without the ability to assert constant social dominance and exclusion—a la Jim Crow—just isn't enough. The pettiness is the point.”
A decade ago, during the 2016 Republican primaries, you could make the argument that there were distinct policy differences between Trump and mainstream Republicans, especially Jeb Bush and (at the time) Marco Rubio. Trump had reshaped the GOP into his own image by 2024, so choosing Trump, who was under indictment for major felonies, over Nikki Haley and definitely Ron DeSantis was a full-bodied rejection of even superficial decency or basic competence.
Trump remains obsessed with the Obamas because they’re Black but also because they represent true decency and American exceptionalism. They’re his white nationalist whale that will prove his undoing.
Don't forget that President Obama openly mocked Trump to his face during the Correspondents Dinner. I remain convinced that that humiliation fueled his subsequent fixation on getting even with Obama, and has led to every racist and personal attack on both of the Obamas since that night.
"I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 1980s. I’m sure most of my teacher were Republicans and quite a few probably held racist views. However, they still believed it was inappropriate to express those views publicly."
This was even unthinkable where I was growing up in the North. Back then out-and-out open racism was something you wouldn't expect from a politician. Even in the Oughts this was a thing (remember the guy from Virginia, Allen was it? who did the "macaca" comment and that did him in.
The thing is now, this sort of racism was already known about the pricktator. But he was the first politician to wholly, openly unlock full on sadopopulism. Sadopopulism is the tactical nuke of politics because it always ends badly; it always ends in eliminiationist rhetoric which then transitions into atrocities (some of which we see now.)